The Winter After This Summer Page 5
Since marriages are made in heaven, the naked, unrelenting contempt that the Egans and Asquiths felt for each other can only be attributed to the same source. My father had met my uncle Charles Asquith for the first time when, as students at the University, they were simultaneously initiated into Iobacchoi. My uncle’s sister Emily was young and pretty. Eventually, she and my father decided to carry on the tradition of fraternal inbreeding which has always been one of Iobacchoi’s proudest boasts, and so, as the romancers put it, they were married.
It is more than possible that had they not married, my father, who was a ruddy, bull-necked, cantankerous Egan of Maartenskill, a long way up the Hudson Valley, and my uncle, who was a pale, long-nosed, suave Asquith of Manhattan, a long way down the Hudson Valley, would have parted company never to meet again, they were that disparate by nature and inclination. As it was, they had little to do with each other until the stock market crash of 1929, working in its mysterious ways, joined them together in the communion of two men sharing a set of handcuffs.
In 1929 my father was still operating the brickyard at Maartenskill that my great-grandfather had taken possession of sixty years before, but even before the crash he had noted the storm warnings sent out by the construction industry. He was a man to play it safe. Before the business could cost him money instead of making it for him, he had closed down the yard, and when early in the Depression he couldn’t find a buyer for it at any price he simply abandoned it. Everything of it that could be sold for scrap was sold; all that was left was the wharf on the Hudson, the clay banks rising above it, a few derelict sheds and kilns, and the old Egan house and barn a quarter of a mile inland. And, of course, since my father had never done more than dabble cautiously in the stock market, there was also left a large, uninvested, and more than ordinarily valuable pile of cash.
At the same time, my uncle Charles, who was in command of the Asquith Trading Company, found himself in dire straits with a failing company and no cash. It must have been a bitter pill for him to have to go to my father for a loan, but he did, and after proper deliberation—I can picture the way my father must have probed into every nook and corner of that company down to the last entry in its ledgers—a loan was negotiated at a fantastic rate of interest. The second loan a year later found my father and his family now living in Manhattan where he could keep a close eye on his interests, and the third, a year after that—it happened to be the year I was born—found him an equal partner in the business. Whether or not his crabbed, tight-fisted approach to the art of commerce was what the company needed became one of the hottest topics of debate between the Egans and the Asquiths, but whatever the reason, the company recovered and prospered.
During this time the only loss my father sustained was through my mother’s death, and while he mourned it plaintively and conspicuously, I am sure that it did not mean quite as much to him as, let’s say, the possible loss of his investment in Asquith & Egan might have meant. I once outraged my sister Margaret by saying this to her, and that was when I learned that Margaret was very much an Egan herself. It came hard, learning that, because up to then, while I had had my battles with Margaret, I had felt that my only real kinship in the family was with her. Afterward, I found it grimly funny to think of what her real feelings must have been during the time when we were kids together, and I would confide private thoughts to her. She had been fifteen when mother died, and I was ten, so that she had endless opportunities to act out the pitying trustee of the poor bereft orphan, and I believed every word of it until the abrupt enlightenment. That happened just before I entered college, so that while I was taken aback by it, I was of an age to cope with it.
Margaret was entirely an Egan in her icy contempt for the Asquiths, and in her grim adherence to Sunday Afternoons, which were calculated to throw Egans and Asquiths into each other’s company. I was very young when I first became aware of Sunday Afternoons. They were, I dimly realized at the time, the occasions when I had to put on a good suit and keep my hands clean and stay in the house no matter what temptations invited me outside, because, as my mother would say, “We’re having a Sunday Afternoon.”
That meant that after church the Asquiths would descend on the Egans or the Egans on the Asquiths—taking turns, I suppose, to keep the books balanced—and then there would be lunch and an embattled session in the living room, where my father and my uncle Darrell Egan and my uncle Vernon Fry, who had married Aunt Nora Egan, and was hence automatically enlisted among the Egans, would pit themselves conversationally against Uncle Charles Asquith and Uncle William McKinley Asquith and Uncle Ruppert Bragg, who had married Aunt Ursula Asquith and was, therefore, a recruit of the Asquiths. I was, of course, on the outskirts of the embattled zone along with my mother and sister and, occasionally, some Egan cousins who added further numbers to the ranks of the Egans. The Asquiths may have been more urbane than the Egans, more adept at the rapier, which was their weapon against the Egan bludgeon, but they were outnumbered.
When my mother died I thought there would never be any more Sunday Afternoons, because they had been, after all, largely the product of her own wistful and nervous efforts to create amity between the clans. And for the three years following, during which Margaret and I lived upstate at the old house near Maartenskill under the tutelage of Earl and Dora Schupfield, the caretakers there, we had no family reunions on the grand scale. But when Margaret finished high school at Maartenskill and entered Barnard College in New York City we moved back with my father, and the Sunday Afternoons suddenly commenced again.
I must have been a pretty naïve kid, because I had no idea they were Margaret’s doing until the day of my larger enlightenment. That was when I remarked to her that I wished father would stop dredging up tender recollections of our mother for the family’s benefit, and I discovered that Margaret was an Egan to make any Egan proud. How dare I question the way father felt about mother, she demanded. And as far as his feelings about money went, it was monstrous to think there was something wrong with a man’s worrying about his family’s security. Father had worked hard enough for us and made enough sacrifices for us, so that I had no right to be an ungrateful monster. I ought to grow up and understand that.
I didn’t feel like a monster. I said with honest bewilderment, “Sacrifice what?” and that did it.
“You idiot,” Margaret said. “Don’t you realize that none of the Asquiths have any children? Don’t you realize we’re the only heirs?”
I had to admit that I had never even thought about being my father’s heir, much less that of my uncle Charles and my uncle William.
“Well, you are,” Margaret said, “and I am, too. Unless they go crazy and get married at their age. Or give everything away to some weird charity. My God, why do you think I even tolerate them on Sunday Afternoons? Why do you think I even have father make Sunday Afternoons when it’s enough to sicken you? If we just act intelligently about it, and if we do remind them now and then about mother and the way we felt about her, it’ll mean an awful lot of money sooner or later. And you can take that look right off your face, or I’ll slap it off. It’s time you stopped being such an idiot about practical things, anyhow. Leave it to Uncle Charles to go around looking like that. It comes perfectly natural to him.”
Ah yes, that, as I have said, was a time of dazzling enlightenment. Afterward, I could listen to my father’s keening over my mother in company with understanding, and could watch Margaret affectionately press her tender lips to Uncle Charles’ pale, smooth cheek in greeting or farewell with honest appreciation of the performance. I suppose that in the long run it is easier to bear outright hypocrisy than illogic. It is more reassuring to know that there is a purpose, whatever you may think of the purpose, behind apparently random and unlikely actions, than to think that they are merely the product of a disordered mind. At least, that is what I found, although my own manner during this process of discovery might not have been quite as objective and restrained as it should have been. In fact, it
goaded my father to a series of violent explosions and cut whatever lines of communication there had been between us up to then.
Looking back in my new-found wisdom it was easy for me to see that the lines of communication had been tenuous at their best. Obviously, I was intended to be one of my father’s safe and sane investments, but somewhere along the line I had gone wrong. From the time Margaret and I had moved back to New York from. Maartenskill it had been told me that the time would come when I would enter the school of commerce at the University, and after graduation would have a place with Asquith & Egan. My job there (officially) would be to contribute to the company’s well-being, and (unofficially) to throw my weight into the balance of power against Uncle Charles and Uncle William. They damn well needed watching, my father would say. God knows what would happen if he didn’t keep an eye on them every minute.
This didn’t mean very much to me when I was fourteen, but by the time I was eighteen—and after I had had my climactic session with Margaret—it came to mean a great deal, and all of it unpleasant. When this became clear to my father—and the battle in which it did raged through every room of the house for weeks at a time—I was allowed to enter the University not on his terms and not on mine, but on the basis of a compromise which seemed to make sense to him, although it made none to me. I would enter the school of engineering, where, at least, I could fit myself for a practical career. So I did, and with such disastrous results that even my father yielded the point and allowed me to transfer to fine arts along with, as he put it, the damned gang of queers who go in for that kind of thing. It is quite possible that if I had not been pledged to Iobacchoi during my freshman year I would have been withdrawn from the University altogether. But my entering Iobacchoi had been one of my father’s dearest dreams since the day he had been notified that his wife had at last borne a son unto him, and the actuality turned out to be my one trump card. It may have been one of life’s loveliest ironies that while my father and my uncle Charles were rejoicing in my carrying on their heritage in Iobacchoi, the brethren in Iobacchoi themselves were rejoicing that they had pledged my father’s son and my uncle’s nephew. I came to the Greeks, it must be noted, bearing gifts. Not money alone, although the Egan and Asquith contributions were writ large, but later I brought in Ben Gennaro himself to the house. In my heyday I was not to be taken lightly.
So my one line of communication to my father—and to my uncle, for that matter—was Iobacchoi. It was a thin line made even more tenuous by the fact that when Ben got his discharge from the Air Force and entered the University at my father’s and uncle’s behest and later entered Iobacchoi at my behest, he seemed to have pretty well supplanted me in whatever there was of the family affections. He was going to go through the school of commerce, going to join Asquith & Egan afterward, and, for a brief time, it even looked as if he were going to become my brother-in-law. He was willing enough, but Margaret wasn’t. He always smelled of sweat, she said. It was true enough, although she was the only girl of his acquaintance who ever seemed to be bothered by that.
Now, in early June, 1953, there was suddenly no more Ben and no more Iobacchoi for me. There was also no money in my pockets and no prospects. There might have been prospects, but not for anyone whom the Egans regarded as an Asquith and the Asquiths as an Egan. For myself, I had to admit that by blood I was both, but by choice I was neither. At least that would spare me an afterlife in the same pit of the Inferno that Dante had planned for them.
He was a wise man, Dante. Both the wasters and the hoarders land in the same place, he said, because both abuse nature. What he must have known as well was that no torment can exceed that of wasters and hoarders being placed in one another’s company. The orthodox and the heretic, the abusive husband and the nagging wife, the black and the white cannot regard each other with more blind incomprehension, more outraged bewilderment than he who squanders and he who hoards. The Egans hoarded, loving money for its own sake, the Asquiths squandered, loving display, and I, without a chance to do either and not caring one way or the other, walked a small circle in limbo, wondering how I came to be there.
And, with my usual perfect sense of timing, walked into my home at the end of my journey from Philadelphia to discover that I was in the middle of a Sunday Afternoon.
FIVE
There was no escape. The house was a brownstone built to outlast the Rock of Ages, and the only way to avoid suffocation in it during the warm months was to open all windows and to keep the sliding doors between the outer hallway and the living room wide apart. The doors were open now, and so I stood behind a proscenium exposed to the gathering of Egans and Asquiths. They regarded me with surprise, and I regarded them miserably, hefting the suitcase, wondering if I dared make a break for the stairway that led to the refuge of my room, knowing I didn’t have the courage to.
My father half rose from his chair, then sat down again. “Come in,” he said, playful as a rhinoceros sharpening its horn against a tree while it studies its prey with a calculating eye. “Come in, Daniel. I’m glad that you’ve decided to pay us a visit. No, you can leave your bag right there while you tell us what drove you to this extremity. Money all gone? Yes, I’m sure it is, so home is the hunter. But Philadelphia? Who in Philadelphia is that close to your heart, Daniel?”
“No one,” I said.
“No one,” said my father. “Now doesn’t that sound mysterious? Come in and tell us about it, Daniel.”
I had estimated myself correctly; I did not have the courage to flee. And knowing that with shame, I came into the room and made the osculatory round of the females there, politely kissing the cheek each aunt offered me in turn and winding up with a peck on my sister’s forehead. My sister and aunts were certainly no more enthusiastic about this ceremony than I, but we had all been so well trained in it by my poor mother that none of us would have dreamed of crying quits. At least for the moment the ceremony forestalled the fire from my father’s siege guns.
Austin Thwaite, the luckless wight who would some day wed my sister, was seated on the couch next to her, and I sat down beside him, feeling a kinship between us. As a man who spent most of his days in the company’s office courting my father and uncle, and most of his evenings courting my sister, he was constantly swimming in stormy waters, and had developed over the years I had known him a sort of nervous affability, a way of eagerly agreeing with what was being said, an oppressive courtesy in the face of small social demands. He was always leaning forward to the family’s conversation, a rapt interest on his face, his head moving up and down in little nods of agreement that by now were like a nervous tic. When the family stood up to leave a room he was always the one at the door holding it open. When someone took out a cigarette he was always the first on his feet with lighter extended. And there was about all this, not the chevalier quality, but an anxiety to serve as if a tip might be forthcoming. Austin at thirty was, in fact, what the family had worked hard to make of him, and was unanimously despised for it.
He clapped a friendly hand on my knee and said, “You look as if you could stand a long cold drink, Dan,” but when my father loudly snorted something unintelligible he hastily withdrew the hand.
“No one?” my father said to me. “Then where were you on Wednesday when your friend was being buried? Is it always too much trouble to you to remember your obligations?”
“Daddy,” said my sister, “you’ll have plenty of time to talk about this later. You don’t have to do it now.”
“I’ll talk about it when I please,” my father said. “I’ll hire a hall and sell tickets and talk about it there if I please. I will not give my son any more consideration than he bothers to give me. Consideration! Standing there in that cemetery with the Gennaros and those damned reporters and that mob of busybodies and the whole membership of Iobacchoi”—he glared at me and held up a forefinger—“with one exception. Just one. Ben Gennaro’s best friend couldn’t show up, because he’s too tender for that, too fine and sensitive, too
chicken-hearted! Why face up to a problem, says he, when you can go off and cry into your beer instead? Don’t tell me you weren’t doing that while I was standing by that grave with everybody looking at me and wondering where the hell you were!”
I said: “No one invited me to the funeral. As a matter of fact—”
“Don’t you as a matter of fact me,” my father said. “Don’t tell me you needed an engraved invitation to get you there. You may be stupid, but you’re not that stupid.”
“Neil,” my aunt Lottie said, “that’s enough. We didn’t come here for a row. Peggy is quite right. You’ll have time enough later to settle this. Unless you’d rather that we—”
“No, I wouldn’t rather anything,” my father said sullenly, and I was grateful that it had been an Egan who had defied him. Had it been an Asquith, it would have been a trumpet blast to battle.
They sat facing each other, the Egans and the Asquiths, and if a line were drawn from me to the window at the far end of the room it would have made a perfect line of demarcation between them. On the one side my father and Uncle Darrell and Aunt Lottie along with Uncle Vernon and Aunt Nora, and across the room Uncle Charles and Uncle William in their passionless bachelorhood together with Uncle Ruppert and Aunt Ursula, who had once borne the Asquith hopes for an heir and who, had there been some means of producing one aside from the sexual act, might have done so. One got the impression from Uncle Ruppert and Aunt Ursula that gentlemen and ladies did not indulge in certain activities best left to peasants and Egans.
Their one aberration was modern art. Offhand, one would have said that my father’s living room with its heavy, overstuffed mahogany furniture, its Oriental rugs, its Pre-Raphaelite reproductions on the walls was the natural environment for Uncle Ruppert and Aunt Ursula, but I came to see with a shock of recognition one day that their own household with its naked angular furniture and stark room dividers and Mondrians and Calders was much more representative of their chilly and antiseptic natures. It was in their apartment that I realized that modern decoration had not cleared away the Victorian clutter but had only squared it off mathematically and refrigerated it. And, in so doing, had produced people like Uncle Ruppert and Aunt Ursula, who resembled attenuated metal sculptures, and never more so than when thrown into the company of Egans, who were altogether round and massive.